PC Perspective on Patreon - Supporting In-Depth, Technical Content

Thank you for all you do!

Much of what I am going to say here is repeated from the description on our brand new Patreon support page, but I think a direct line to our readers is in order.

First, I think you may need a little back story. Ask anyone that has been doing online media in this field for any length of time and they will tell you that getting advertisers to sign on and support the production of "free" content has been getting more and more difficult. You'll see this proven out in the transition of several key personalities of our industry away from media into the companies they used to cover. And you'll see it in the absorption of some of our favorite media outlets, being purchased by larger entities with the promise of being able to continue doing what they have been doing. Or maybe you've seen it show as more interstitial ads, road blocks, sponsored site sections, etc.

At PC Perspective we've seen the struggle first hand but I have done my best to keep as much of that influence away from my team. We are not immune - several years ago we started doing site skins, something we didn't plan for initially. I do think I have done a better than average job keeping the lights on here though, so to speak. We have good sell through on our ad inventory and some of the best companies in our industry support the work we do.

Some of the PC Perspective team at CES 2016

Let me be clear though - we aren't on the verge of going out of business. I am not asking for Patreon supporters to keep from firing anyone. We just wanted to maintain and grow our content library and capability and it seemed like the audience that benefits and enjoys that content might be the best place to start.

Some of you are likely asking yourself if supporting PC Perspective is really necessary? After all, you can chug out a 400 word blog in no time! The truth is that high quality, technical content takes a lot of man hours and those hours are expensive. Our problem is that to advertisers, a page view is a page view, they don't really care how much time and effort went into creating the content on that page. If we spend 20 hours developing a way to evaluate variable refresh rate monitors with an oscilloscope, but put the results on a single page at pcper.com, we get the same amount of traffic as someone that just posts an hour's worth of gameplay experiences. Both are valuable to the community, but one costs a lot more to produce.

Frame Rating testing methodology helped move the industry forward

The easy way out is to create click bait style content (have you seen the new Marvel trailer??!?) and hope for enough extra page views to make up for the difference. But many people find the allure of the cheap/easy posts too easy and quickly devolve into press releases and marketing vomit. No one at PC Perspective wants to see that happen here.

Not only do we want to avoid a slide into that fate but we want to improve on what we are doing, going further down the path of technical analysis with high quality writing and video content. Very few people are working on this kind of writing and analysis yet it is vitally important to those of you that want the information to make critical purchasing decisions. And then you, in turn, pass those decisions on to others with less technical interest (brothers, mothers, friends).

We have ideas for new regular shows including a PC Perspective Mailbag, a gaming / Virtual LAN Party show and even an old hardware post-mortem production. All of these take extra time beyond what each person has dedicated today and the additional funding provided by a successful Patreon campaign will help us towards those goals.

I don't want anyone to feel that they are somehow less of a fan of PC Perspective if you can't help - that's not what we are about and not what I stand for. Just being here, reading and commenting on our work means a lot to us. You can still help by spreading the word about stories you find interesting or even doing your regular Amazon.com shopping through our link on the right side bar.

But for those of you that can afford a monthly contribution, consider a "value for value" amount. How much do you think the content we have produced and will produce is worth to you? If that's $3/month, thank you! If that's $20/month, thank you as well!

Support PC Perspective through Patreon

The team and I spent a lot of our time in the last several weeks talking through this Patreon campaign and we are proud to offer ourselves up to our community. PC Perspective is going to be here for a long time, and support from readers like you will help us be sure we can continue to improve and innovate on the information and content we provide.

I would just like to say that I am proud to have worked for PC Perspective for almost five years now. In those five years Ryan has allowed me full editorial control to learn about and cover the things that I find interesting and that I feel would be useful information to the readers. He has done a exemplary job of separating the operations and advertising aspects from the writing and analysis. The team has always been encouraged to dig deep into the hardware and branch out into new types of content free from outside influences.

Regardless of whether or not you contribute through Patreon, I want to personally thank all of you for your continued support. I am excited for the future of PC Perspective (in particular we have a lot of cool video content we would love to do that the extra funding would make possible), and to know that we are able to grow along with our community of readers while remaining an independent, ahem, perspective of the technology industry is an amazing feeling.

I'm very glad you opened this up. I'm adamantly against advertisements and this allows me to support a site that I consider one of the few quality tech sites out there. Please, please, please as you make any future changes don't add the reddit-esque comment voting system that turns every site that uses it into the same circle jerking hive mind. Perhaps it's just me but there's something that feels more genuine when I'm manually submitting comments and doing battle with bot posts. People who comment here generally put more thought and consideration into their comments than those other sites because there's no popularity contest here.

For around 3 years now, Wednesday night is a ritual for me. Friends know it, my newborn son is learning, and my wife is all too accustomed. By 8:45. I start filling my hot tub. I pour a glass of Bulliet bourbon.

Yes, there are bubbles. A mountain of bubbles. Twitch or Youtube (whichever is working at the moment because of fucking god damn Ken) is loaded onto my iPad. It has its dedicated mounting point at the end of my tub. And then we wait.

While my bubbles roar atop the pounding force of my tub's jets, Allyn makes us all uncomfortably silent with a Navy joke. Josh recedes further into Wyoming. Sebastian mentions a DAC for his NES. Morry finds a CMOS battery. And Jeremy says "cayche" again.

I happy to help but is there a way to that with paypal directly. From what I see I have to create another account on Patreon and put my CC or Paypal. I just don't want to deal with one more account that I will most likely don't use for anything else.

nope, this campaign is for additional content and benefits. You won't lose any access you have right now ... unless we tank horribly in which case you will need to click "10 Unbeleivable things you never expected to happen on PCPer."

I find myself with an overwhelming desire to click on the "10 Unbelievable things you never expected to happen on PCPer." but the link is not working!!!

For real though, happy to support. I honestly didn't know how you made it this far without something like this. You go long stretches with no podcast advertisers at all. I was just assuming that Jeremy was doing it as a hobby. No, no, that's not a slam on the quality of his work...

Honestly, the podcast has never been a profitable part of the pcper.com website; it was meant to be a way to communicate directly with the audiece and show that we aren't faceless writers but instead are realistic human robot synths!

But you wouldn't post that news on the Canadian VR startup I forwarded to you last year. If you are not content with Canadian content, who will be? Long live Canada and all queens. And you are Canadian content, as you suggest, but I think they want more, which is a nice thing.